In this essay, I argue that Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of meta‐Reality creates the middle way to theorize emancipation in critical science education: between empiricism and idealism on the one hand, and naïve realism and relativism, on the other hand. This theorization offers possibilities to transcend the usual dichotomies and dualisms that are often perpetuated in some feminist and multiculturalist accounts of critical science education. Further, meta‐Reality suggests a radically new way to re‐visit the suspect notion of emancipation. The implications (...) for critical science education are discussed. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of meta‐Reality creates the middle way to theorize emancipation in critical science education: between empiricism and idealism on the one hand, and naïve realism and relativism, on the other hand. This theorization offers possibilities to transcend the usual dichotomies and dualisms that are often perpetuated in some feminist and multiculturalist accounts of critical science education. Further, meta‐Reality suggests a radically new way to re‐visit the suspect notion of emancipation. The implications (...) for critical science education are discussed. (shrink)

Most scholars have focused on The Second Sex and Simone de Beauvoir’s fiction, concentrating on gender issues but ignoring her broader emancipatory vision. Though Beauvoir’s political thinking is not as closely studied as her feminist works, it underpinned her activism and helped her navigate the dilemmas raised by revolutionary thought in the postwar period. In Emancipatory Thinking Elaine Stavro brings together Beauvoir’s philosophy and her political interventions to produce complex ideas on emancipation. Drawing from a range of (...) work, including novels, essays, autobiographical writings, and philosophic texts, Stavro explains that for Beauvoir freedom is a movement that requires both personal and collective transformation. Freedom is not guaranteed by world historical systems, material structures, wilful action, or discursive practices, but requires engaged subjects who are able to take creative risks as well as synchronize with existing forces to work towards collective change. Beauvoir, Stavro asserts, resisted the trend of anti-humanism that has dominated French thinking since the 1960s and also managed to avoid the pitfalls of voluntarism and individualism. In fact, Stavro argues, Beauvoir appreciated the impact of material, socio-economic, institutional forces, without forgoing the capacity to initiate. Applying Beauvoir’s existential insights and understanding of embodied and situated subjectivity to recent debates within gender, literary, sociological, cultural, and political studies, Emancipatory Thinking provides a lens to explore the current political and theoretical landscape. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present the theoretical and philosophical assumptions of the Nursing Manifesto , written by three activist scholars whose objective was to promote emancipatory nursing research, practice, and education within the dialogue and praxis of social justice. Inspired by discussions with a number of nurse philosophers at the 2008 Knowledge Conference in Boston, two of the original Manifesto authors and two colleagues discussed the need to explicate emancipatory knowing as it emerged from the (...) Manifesto . Our analysis yielded an epistemological framework based on liberation principles to advance praxis in the discipline of nursing. This paper adds to what is already known on this topic, as there is not an explicit contribution to the literature of this specific Manifesto , its significance, and utility for the discipline. While each of us have written on emancipatory knowing and social justice in a variety of works, it is in this article that we identify, as a unit of knowledge production and as a direction towards praxis, a set of critical values that arose from the emancipatory conscience-ness and intention seen in the framework of the Nursing Manifesto. (shrink)

In seeking to move beyond causal-reductivism, this book explores a variety of perspectives on the question of finding inherent meaning in madness and extreme states.

I argue that Habermas’ critique of Nietzsche overlooks the similarities between his conception of an emancipatory social science and Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy. I conclude that it is necessary to disagree with Habermas’ contention that with Nietzsche the critique of modernity abandons its emancipatory content.

The purpose of this paper is to present the theoretical and philosophical assumptions of the Nursing Manifesto, written by three activist scholars whose objective was to promote emancipatory nursing research, practice, and education within the dialogue and praxis of social justice. Inspired by discussions with a number of nurse philosophers at the 2008 Knowledge Conference in Boston, two of the original Manifesto authors and two colleagues discussed the need to explicate emancipatory knowing as it emerged from the Manifesto. (...) Our analysis yielded an epistemological framework based on liberation principles to advance praxis in the discipline of nursing. This paper adds to what is already known on this topic, as there is not an explicit contribution to the literature of this specific Manifesto, its significance, and utility for the discipline. While each of us have written on emancipatory knowing and social justice in a variety of works, it is in this article that we identify, as a unit of knowledge production and as a direction towards praxis, a set of critical values that arose from the emancipatory conscience-ness and intention seen in the framework of the Nursing Manifesto. (shrink)

Social opposition to instituted policies and practices marks the sites of resistance that populate the contemporary political landscape. Animated by the prospects of a better and more just world, the emancipatory ambitions of social and political movements bring to the fore discrepancies between ideologically congealed power relations and habits of thought and the subversive function of utopian expectations. Paul Ricoeur reminds us that our participation in society is invariably punctuated by our experiences of reality’s noncongruence with imaginative alternatives we (...) can project and upon which we can act. After explaining how literary fictions open spaces for reworking reality, I set out the imagination’s analogous power on the political plane. The struggles with which social and political movements are engaged seek to transform established conventions. Hence, like literary works, these movements aim at refashioning the existing order of reality from within. Protest movements attest to how struggles for recognition combat systemic injustices by holding out the prospect of a different and better future. Consequently, these movements exemplify the power that springs from individuals acting in consort, as evidenced by recent protests against the Trump administration. Conversely, violence destroys power. In view of the way that future expectations animate the force of the present, I therefore argue that dystopic representations of authoritarian regimes in Margret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s 1984 fulfill a critical, social function as apocalyptic harbingers of political corruption and deceit. As such, these dystopian novels intensify the force that the present has as a time of crisis and decision. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up the challenge that political activism runs the risk of generating abstract freedoms for oppressed subjects and neglecting the effects of oppression on the development of subjectivity. I argue that a political activism in concert with a companion ethics of advocacy and listening is best positioned to improve the political and economic conditions of individuals as well as ensure that they are able to realize their freedom in meaningful action. In this paper I distinguish political (...) emancipation from human emancipation using the political and ethical writings of Simone de Beauvoir. I then argue that a feminist ethics of advocacy and listening can serve the project of human emancipation as emancipatory advocacy. I then return to Beauvoir to illuminate the dynamics of privilege, risk, and ambiguity in emancipatory advocacy through her own activism and advocacy in the case of Djamila Boupacha and Algerian independence. (shrink)

To provide rigour when preparing a research design, the researcher needs to carefully consider not only the methodology but also the philosophical intent of the study. This, however, is often absent from reported research and provides the reader with little evidence by which to judge the merits of the chosen methodology and its influence on the study. The purpose of this paper is to set out the case for critical realism as a framework to guide appropriate action in practice development (...) and realistic evaluation for understanding the consequences of those actions.It is evident that critical realism and critical social science share common ground. Emancipatory practice development (ePD) is based on the philosophy of critical social science and therefore by virtue is linked to the tenets of critical realism. Until now, the evaluation of ePD programme has been well served by 4th-generation evaluation. However, this paper outlines the need for a different approach to evaluation, one that is based on critical realism, that is concerned with emancipation, and that can be used in the ever-changing environment of clinical practice. Realistic evaluation not only links strongly to ePD programmes, but also serves as the basis for effective research questions that will test the outcomes of the research and inform the transferability of ePD mechanisms into differing contexts. (shrink)

Analytic moral philosophers have generally failed to engage in any substantial way with the cultural history of morality. This is a shame, because a genealogy of morals can help us accomplish two important tasks. First, a genealogy can form the basis of an epistemological project, one that seeks to establish the epistemic status of our beliefs or values. Second, a genealogy can provide us with functional understanding, since a history of our beliefs, values or institutions can reveal some inherent dynamic (...) or pattern which may be problematically obscured from our view. In this paper, I try to make good on these claims by offering a sketchy genealogy of emancipatory values, or values which call for the liberation of persons from systems of dominance and oppression. The real history of these values, I argue, is both epistemologically vindicatory and functionally enlightening. (shrink)

The paper addresses the issue of the corporeal dimension of the learning process. The problem of the material side of education has emerged within the emancipatory education project, but, as will be argued, this was limited to a critique inspired by Marxist tradition. The perspective on the materiality of education offered by Freire’s and Illich’s works can be significantly enriched by contemporary political thought. The latter perceives materiality in its complexity, that is, as economic conditions but also as the (...) inherent needs stemming from our bodily condition. As will be demonstrated, the contemporary reflection could serve as a critique, one on the limited character of Freire’s and Illich’s emancipatory education, as well as providing ideas which might expand their project. (shrink)

Love is a recurring theme in bell hooks' thought, where it is explicitly linked to her understanding of freedom and liberation. In this essay, I will bring together some of hooks' most important writings on love in order to clarify her account of the relationship between love and liberation. I will argue that, for hooks, the practice of love and the practice of freedom are inextricably connected, and any liberatory project must be undertaken within the context of an ethics of (...) love. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper is premised on the call to re-orientate marketing as a contributing social science. It gathers together criticisms of marketing research which identify inconsistencies that prevent our progress. It posits that we are driven to reproduce these inconsistencies because of a closed-system of practice and because of the generative absence of an effective, reflexive and integrative metatheoretical structure. In response to these problems, the paper aims to offer an integrative metatheoretical structure from which to ground our research and intervene (...) in the identified inconsistencies. The paper therefore offers a perspective on the constitution of the world, before addressing the terms and conditions on which the world is to be researched and explained. This conceptual contribution employs tools developed in the critical realist philosophy of social science to address: instances of absence within marketing research; and how these instances are generated and reproduced. It then suggests how these absences can be rectified. (shrink)

Due to the controversy surround his political war-time writings, Nishida Kitarō and his entire corpus has been accused of promoting and supporting Japanese imperialism. Despite the valid criticisms of his writings during the war-time period, Nishida’s early work in An Inquiry into the Good is not so easily interpreted as supporting nationalism. In fact, depending on the lens through which one reads Nishida’s early writings, one can even find the germs of emancipatory ideas that can easily be put in (...) dialogue with other liberatory thinkers such as Marx, Kropotkin, and Adorno. In this article, by considering the pluripotentiality of the text rather than a hermetically sealed off nationalist reading of it, I reread the ethical politics in An Inquiry into the Good through an emancipatory lens, considering how Nishida’s thought could have been taken up in a very different post-1911 Japan that did not move toward authoritarian militarism. Furthermore, I argue that the ambiguity surrounding his early political writings is consistent with his resistance to authoritarian ethics and his emphasis on the autonomy of the individual. (shrink)

All politics (i.e., a collective organised thought-practice), if it is to be emancipatory, must exhibit a dialectic of expressive and excessive thought. The absence of the dialectic implies the absence of a politics. The same point can be made by stressing that, in emancipatory politics, thought and practice are indistinguishable. The dialectic here concerns an emancipatory politics latent in excluded popular African traditions. Such latency means that a potentiality for dialectical thought often already exists within African traditions. (...) Yet it can only be activated in struggle. I show through three examples separated by long periods of time, that Africans—or more accurately some Africans—have successfully activated existing potentials into emancipatory politics by thinking against and beyond the oppressive particularities of interests, place and identity embedded in dominant cultures (such as those typical of civil society today) and have thus emphasised the centrality of universal humanity in the politics of emancipation. (shrink)

As bellicose nationalism continues to intensify in Western societies, letting loose ever more violent eruptions of hostility toward migrants and mid-wifing such astonishing developments as the Brexit vote and the Trump candidacy, the problem of how to theorize and mobilize a transformative politics of migrant justice has rarely seemed more pressing. Jacques Rancière’s writings offer resonant terms with which to meet the philosophical challenges of this urgent moment. Rancière’s conceptualization of political subordination in terms of defining “the part that has (...) no part” is intuitively well suited to thinking through both the dense interplays of inclusion and exclusion that structure migrant lives and the... (shrink)

This paper explores Erich Fromm’s contribution to Deweyan democratic education by referring to his psychoanalytic interpretation of John Dewey’s pragmatic theory. First, it employs the work by Gert Biesta to secure a space between critical pedagogy and Deweyan democratic education, from which Fromm’s theory can be discussed. Furthermore, it argues that Biesta’s perspective offers a valuable theoretical ground to extend the emancipatory potential of Deweyan democratic education, while avoiding some pitfalls of critical pedagogy. Subsequently, the paper contrasts Marcuse’s and (...) Fromm’s views on Dewey to show how Fromm’s understanding of Dewey was more effective than that of Marcuse for developing the potential of Dewey’s philosophy. Next, the paper clarifies key similarities and differences between Fromm’s psychoanalysis and Dewey’s pragmatism, as it is applicable specifically to emancipatory education. Finally, the paper argues that despite the differences between these two thinkers, Fromm’s theory further radicalizes Deweyan democratic education by adding new elements to the list of preconditions on the role of the emancipatory teacher. (shrink)

Communist discourses are resurging in various disciplines across the globe. Philosophy has its share of this resurgence especially after the global financial crisis of 2008 made a number of its thinkers convene in various conferences and intellectually meet in a host of publications. In these intellectual engagements, the idea of communism is once again interrogated as the moribund capitalist system failed humanity its promise. Alain Badiou is among the leading figures in the philosophical task of (re)interrogating the idea of (...) communism. Badiou raised the urgency of reformulating what he calls as the communist hypothesis for it to both reconsider its supposed failures of the past and better suit the current conditions. Badiou is particularly guided by the lessons of the May ’68 of France, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of China, and various contemporary popular uprisings to develop a reformulation of the communist hypothesis. In advancing a laborious task of reformulation, Badiou inevitably rejected a core category of the Marxist-Leninist tradition: the party. The rejection is supported by a view of the party that reduced it to its supposed fusion with the State, i.e., the party-State fusion. Such a fusion is characterized by either parliamentarian or insurrectionary politics. In this politics, Badiou argues that the party is obstructed from advancing further the proletarian revolution as it is tied to a Statist procedure. This work develops a Maoist reformulation of the communist hypothesis. Along the course of the socialist constructions of Russia and China, certain moments of what can be called as indigenized and mobilizational politics characterized periods that escape what Badiou reduced the party into, i.e., the party-State fusion. The Maoist notions of the mass line and protractedness come out as indispensable requisites in developing the concepts of indigenized and mobilizational politics. These moments depicted what can be called as the party-masses fusion and provided practical resources not only for the rectification of the supposed failures of the past but also for a reformulation of the communist hypothesis. Through the development and employment of the category of the party-masses fusion and the politics that determine it, the reformulation of the communist hypothesis is supported by a discourse of success rather than of defeat. (shrink)

This paper historicizes the taken‐for‐granted acceptance of reflection as a fundamental professional practice in nursing. It draws attention to the broad application of reflective practice, from pedagogy to practice to regulation, and explores the epistemological basis upon which the authority of reflective discourse rests. Previous work has provided a series of critiques of the logic and suitability of reflective practice across all domains of nursing. The goal of this paper is to commence a history of nursing's reflective identity. The paper (...) begins with a discussion of Dewey and Schön then focuses on Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action as the epistemological basis of reflective practice's standing as a authoritative discourse in nursing. (shrink)

"The Critical Theory of Religion: From the Frankfurt School to Emancipatory Islamic Thought" is a collection of essay of Dr. Dustin J. Byrd, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Olivet College. The book concerns the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory of Society and how it relates to religion, especially Islam, in the contemporary world.

Reactivity is usually seen as a problem in the human sciences. In this paper I argue that in emancipatory activist research, reactivity can be an important tool. I discuss one example: the aim of mental decolonisation in indigenous activist research. I argue that mental decolonisation can be understood as the act of replacing harmful looping effects with new, emancipatory ones.

Abstract“Freedom” is a fundamental political concept: contestations or endorsements of freedom-conceptions concern the fundamental normative orientation of sociopolitical orders. Focusing on “freedom,” this article argues that the project of bringing about emancipatory sociopolitical orders is both aided by efforts at engineering fundamental political concepts as well as required by such ameliorative ambitions. I first argue that since the absence of ideology is a constituent feature of emancipatory orders, any attempt at bringing about emancipation should leverage genealogical approaches in (...) order to debunk existing ideological freedom-concepts, which can occur only by exposing the discursive functions these have come to serve for the (re-)production of dominant power relations. I then suggest that establishing and sustaining an alternative, ideology-free conception of “freedom” is a steeper task. Ensuring widespread uptake of any ameliorated concept is contingent on effective change in the relevant social environment. Where fundamental political concepts such as “freedom” are concerned, effective intervention in the relevant social environment requires radical sociopolitical change. But if such change can be brought about and enables the widespread uptake of an “improved” freedom-concept, the concept's content comes to reflect changed social facts, thereby stabilizing the particular emancipatory sociopolitical order which has newly arisen. (shrink)

This paper articulates the commitments, contours and justifications for a pluralist but non-eclectic critical, realist, reflexive social science with emancipatory aims. In it, we stress that social science can and should be used to guide the conceptualization of desirable and viable forms of social organization and their conditions of realization. In this regard, we advocate explanatory theorizing as an ethical duty of social scientists and as a moral good in itself as well as being an inherent epistemological component of (...) scientific practice. This entails that we take seriously the research strategies apposite to our disciplinary, intertextual and interdiscursive locations to make a serious theoretical case and practical case for the kind of social science here advocated. In our view, such a social science must acknowledge the path-breaking work of Roy Bhaskar, but must also recognize that the arguments deployed in texts as a resource in intellectual work can never be treated as the axiomatic grounds for further thought, but must be interrogated thoroughly and in each case what is to be retained must be defensible. No position has a monopoly of relevant insights and the development of science often involves syntheses. Syntheses must not be syncretic but reflexively interrogated to assess epistemological, ontological and conceptual coherence to avoid eclecticism. Development in critical realist philosophy will, we believe, continue to confront and offer plausible resolutions to a range of battles within and pertinent to philosophy and social-scientific metatheory. However, realists must recognize the continuing importance and discursive effects of a variety of critical and realist work in being able to defend, sustain and develop rigorous social-scientific research with emancipatory commitments. (shrink)

In this article, I explore my own classroom practices as a teacher of a university course on curriculum in order to investigate the potential emancipatory significance of a Rancièrean conversation-oriented curriculum. To provide a lived account of how emancipatory education with the premise of equality can be embraced, albeit not without challenges, in actual classroom practices, I focus on my most unsuccessful teaching experience—one in which I was routinely confronted by unusually prolonged periods of silence from my students. (...) I first explore how I responded to the challenges which emerged from my commitment to positioning myself and my students as intellectual equals. Then, I attempt to articulate the emancipatory significances of inviting my students to aesthetically attend to the curricular materials, class conversations, and the silence itself. I also reveal how a Rancièrean reading of my practice exposed my own deep ties to an institutionalized distribution of time and helped me to re-imagine the meanings of success and failure in an emancipatory education. (shrink)

The future of work has become a pressing matter of concern: Researchers, business consultancies, and industrial companies are intensively studying how new work models could be best implemented to increase workplace flexibility and creativity. In particular, the agile model has become one of the “must-have” elements for re-organizing work practices, especially for technology development work. However, the implementation of agile work often comes together with strong presumptions: it is regarded as an inevitable tool that can be universally integrated into different (...) workplaces while having the same outcome of flexibility, transparency, and flattened hierarchies everywhere. This paper challenges such essentializing assumptions by turning agile work into a “matter of care.” We argue that care work occurs in contexts other than feminized reproductive work, namely, technology development. Drawing on concepts from feminist Science and Technology Studies and ethnographic research at agile technology development workplaces in Germany and Kenya, we examine what work it takes to actually keep up with the imperative of agile work. The analysis brings the often invisibilized care practices of human and nonhuman actors to the fore that are necessary to enact and stabilize the agile promises of flexibilization, co-working, and rapid prototyping. Revealing the caring sociotechnical relationships that are vital for working agile, we discuss the emergence of power asymmetries characterized by hierarchies of skills that are differently acknowledged in the daily work of technology development. The paper ends by speculating on the emancipatory potential of a care perspective, by which we seek to inspire careful Emancipatory Technology Studies. (shrink)

Teodor Adorno's work Philosophy and Teachers was first read as a report at the Frankfurt Studenthome in November 1961. In this report Adorno continued the topic of criticism of those factors of the then formation of West Germany, which made impossible a personal fight intellectual to with the cultural remnants of a totalitarian society. Adorno drew attention an exam in philosophy, important element of the educational process. This exam should pass composed of future teachers, candidates for the work (...) of the teacher of gymnasium. This exam should be composed by future teachers, candidates for the work of the teacher of gymnasium. Adorno noticed the tendency of formalistic adherence to the Rules of Examination by some future teachers who are unable to understand the humanistic, emancipatory and spiritual essence of philosophy, and therefore do not understand the purpose of conducting this exam. Adorno honored the long tradition of academic freedom of the German University and noticed the figure of the German philosopher, describing him as the man whose intellectual activity influenced the humanization of the German University, which directly influenced to the corresponding cultural transformations. But in post-war universities in the Federal Republic of Germany there is a trend to the principles of scientific knowledge. This tendency is coupled with the attitude of some future teachers to knowledge as appropriation to the consumer way, was due to the absence of personal love for their own specialty and to their students. Adorno was convinced that such teachers are indifferent to their specialty and do not have a calling to him. Adorno defined as a sign to the absence of calling in these people is intellectual negligence, provincial speech and provincial inability to understand human freedom as a spiritual value. Such teachers are incapable of offering new knowledge to their students by way of perfekt speech and by way of perfekt written presentation. As completely different Adorno offered to see a person who is capable to appropriation of the knowledge that is needed to understand hemseif and his professional obligation. This person can will use self-understand and self-reflection, and therefore she can will independently to understand of the sense of their pedagogical work. This person will be faithful and patient in carrying out his work for the practical introduction of humanistic ideals of prior philosophical knowledge into society. (shrink)

In this exciting new study, Eugene Gogol interweaves three strands that form the intellectual bedrock for the concept of the Other in the Latin American context: Hegel's dialectic of negativity, Marx's humanism, and autochthonal emancipatory thought. From this foundation, the book explores the relation of liberatory philosophic thought to today's social and class movements. Gogol considers the logic of capitalism on Latin American soil, the ecological crisis in Latin America, and the concept and practice of self-liberation. Still one of (...) the most contested terrains of Latin American thought, the Other has been of central concern for many luminary thinkers including Leopoldo Zea, Octavio Paz, and José Carlos Mariátegui. While these writers may not garner much publicity in the world press, the highly public and ongoing struggles of the Zapatistas and Brazil's Landless Workers Movement demonstrate the continuing need to theorize the volatile nature of Latin American social reality. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the kind of ethical-metaphysical theory of the state that we broadly associate with idealist political philosophy provides us with a theoretical account of the state that is both sound and insightful and that, far from having been consigned to the dustbin of history by the hostile criticisms to which it has been subjected in the 20th century , it still remains the most profound and powerful account of the state available to the political (...) science community today. It is extremely important, I contend, in helping us to understand the state’s vital function as the font of emancipatory political criticism. I also suggest that the ethical-metaphysical theory of the state has the distinct advantage of providing us with a genuine ‘theory of the state’, for it alone wholeheartedly subscribes to the view that the state is the inner core or substance of political life, whereas its critics generally hold that the state is a dangerous illusion. (shrink)

Critical and Emancipatory Theory (CET) of peacebuilding emerged as the sixth school of thought in Peace and Conflict Studies to critique the liberal and neoliberal approaches to peacebuilding. CET contends that liberal and neoliberal approaches to peacebuilding are discriminatory and biased, perpetrates the interest of Western elites, hinders the achievement of social justice, and considers the local as insignificant for peacebuilding. A call for the reformation of the liberal and neoliberal approaches necessitated the CET school of thought to outline (...) certain principles and guidelines that could guide the practice of peace-building. Different methodologies, intervention strategies, principles and approaches that could guide praxis have therefore been advanced by scholars, researchers, and practitioners. This paper therefore examines and reflects on the multiplex methodologies in peacebuilding, the adoption of a multidisciplinary approach to understanding peace and peacebuilding, and the question of intervention in post-war peacebuilding, the principles that guide the implementation of peacebuilding from the lens of Critical and Emancipatory school of thought. This piece contend that CET approach may not be self-sufficient but would be the most appropriate way to decentralize the peacebuilding process and, as such, local or indigenous peacebuilding processes must be encouraged while acknowledging the salient role of the international community as well. (shrink)

Educational Theory, Volume 71, Issue 6, Page 717-741, December 2021. -/- Gert Biesta has criticized Anglo-American and German models of emancipatory education. According to Biesta, emancipation is understood in these models as liberation that results from a process in which a teacher transmits objective knowledge to his or her students and cultivates student capabilities. He claims that this so-called modern logic of emancipation does not lead to freedom because it installs inequality, dependency, and mistrust in the pedagogical relationship. In (...) this article, Antti Moilanen and Rauno Huttunen analyze whether German models of emancipatory education share the modern logic of emancipation and if they can escape Biesta's criticisms. For this purpose, they interpret Biesta's critique of the modern logic of emancipation and explicate central ideas related to the German models of critical education. They also compare the modern logic of emancipation to the German one, and they then assess German models of emancipatory pedagogy from the viewpoint of Biesta's criticisms. Moilanen and Huttunen conclude that the German models of emancipatory education present at least a partial alternative to the modern logic of emancipation. Despite this, the German models are based on the idea of education as cultivation. Because Biesta criticizes the theory of education as cultivation, it is possible to conclude that he would not accept the German models of emancipatory education. However, the German models of critical pedagogy provide answers to the following question: how can students achieve independence in the pedagogical relationship? When students take part in designing educational processes, they are summoned to assess the validity of the taught knowledge, and they practice independent decision-making at school; the pedagogical relationship, based on authority, can foster student self-determination. (shrink)

This text has already been published in Studies in Philosophy and Education, Feb. 2018, n° 37, p.103–107. As we all know it, writing and reading takes time. In the contemporary social and academic context, often shaped by a destabilizing sense of acceleration and urgency, protecting the moments required for such ‘time-consuming' activities is not something that can be taken for granted anymore. The way we commit to a specific task expresses as much about the meaning it may carry that (...) what we - Débats. (shrink)

This paper starts with an apparently provocative question – can we call the 2019 Water Revolution in Hong Kong a lesson of emancipatory education which awakens students’ critical consciousn...

Inspired by the life and works of GrammyAward® winning artist, Lil Nas X, we explore ways a young Black queer musician has enacted emancipatory utopias to disrupt dominant cultural modes of being—offering unapologetic expressions and expansions of race, gender, and sexual identity. In this paper, we draw upon José Esteban Muñoz and Ytasha Womak to consider how utopian thinking through the lenses of queer futurity and Afrofuturism provides a way to dismantle the hegemonic and proleptic trappings of music education (...) and contemplate how music learners and teachers might enact emancipatory utopias relevant to their own historically lived experiences. (shrink)

This is a critical theoretical investigation of Hubert Dreyfus’ ‘phenomenology of everyday expertise’ (PEE). Operating mainly through the critical perspective of the ‘emancipatory interest’ the article takes issue with the contention that when engaged in expert action human beings are in non-deliberative, reason-free absorption. The claim of PEE that absorbed actions are not amenable to reconstruction places those actions outside the space of reasons. The question of acting under the wrong reasons – the question upon which the emancipatory (...) interest rests – is thereby rendered groundless. A further difficulty for the emancipatory interest is the elimination by PEE of reflective agency. Framing expert action as perception- and affordance-driven, PEE diminishes practical reasoning. Furthermore, it understands freedom – consistently with its notion of action as affordance – as primarily the capacity of human beings to submit themselves to processes rather than to step back reflectively from them. Several criticisms of the philosophical delimitations created by methodology of PEE – phenomenology – are also developed. (shrink)

The paper discusses Jane-Anna Gordon's important idea of the Creolization of Poitical Theory with reference to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frantz Fanon. It makes an argument for synthesizing this initiative with dialectical thought in order to transcend the analytical vision which gave birth to the creolizing of theory. This synthesis is proposed in order to make sense of the real of any politics of universal emancipation and to incorporate the theoretical inventions of popular actions.

That’s great, it starts with an earthquake… are the famous opening tenets to REM’s anthemic stream of political consciousness, ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it’ and within this treatise, th...

This paper deals with the political philosophy of Václav Havel, mainly its relation to ethics and what Michel Foucault called governmentality. Besides using his analytical framework, Foucault’s politics are engaged with to highlight similar trajectories of two intellectuals dealing with related dilemmas of ethics and politics. As a dissident of communist Czechoslovakia Havel, developed a profound critique of modernity, but also discovered technologies of the self, exclusive to dissidents, which empowered them in their moral struggle against the regime. The (...) Velvet Revolution in 1989 ascended Havel to the presidency of the republic, a position from which he quickly embraced and disseminated neoliberal governmentality. The final section deals with Havel’s use of human rights in the later years of his presidency, being a justification for military interventions and comparing them to Foucault’s conceptualisation of rights. Human rights discourse is the culmination of Havel’s lifelong quest for the ethical foundation of politics and it is the source of most difficulties and potentialities associated with this project. (shrink)

This paper, rather than providing a comprehensive discussion around Paulo Freire’s ideas, focuses on one aspect of his body of work: colonialism. The emphasis is on the ‘oppressor consciousness’ and cultural invasion (seen in its broadest context to include institutional colonialism with special reference to the traditional, modernizing and prophetic church. It also deals with the complex issue of language in postcolonial contexts, with special reference to education in Guinea Bissau and its implications for other colonial contexts.